The risk of open access becoming integrated into existing commercial publishing - the need of a global system of non-commercial open access scholarly communications

"In Europe and USA scholarly communications have been outsourced and one of the most profitable businesses was built by main international commercial scholarly publishers, which today offer to take care of open access, building a new enclosure to knowledge for the Global South, and distracting governments, funding agencies and the scholarly community, in the North and in the South, from the need to build a global open access ecosystem based on shared and interoperable institutional, national and international non-commercial open access repositories and publishing platforms. If we want voices from the Global South to have more participation and impact in global conversations about issues that concern us all, the global scholarly community has to take good care of open access scholarly communications, including the peer-review, quality control and evaluation indicators systems"

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Thanks Dominique. I have been involved for decades in related efforts, for example early involvement with H-NET , creating with my close colleague Timothy Shortell a website/blog with image galleries, and now as co-editor with Italo Pardo of Urbanities.

A major problem for scholars in the Global South and elsewhere is the requirement to publish in English. Many manuscripts and offerings however require a great deal of editing and often submitters do not have the financial resources to pay for good quality English language editing. This has created a quandary for honest brokers of scholarship who can only suggest or urge scholars to have this work done as out own voluntary efforts, as for reviewers, are also limited. Open Access, under these conditions of language hegemony, would require an equitable solution to this problem.